You’re Never Alone: Social Workers Help Patients through Treatment, Surgery …
Sacramento Bee
Specialized hospital social workers are available in many communities to provide a broad range of services, ranging from emotional support to community resource referrals, building relationships with patients in their time of crises.

A Missed Opportunity to Recruit Specialists in Elder Care
New York Times (blog)
By PAULA SPAN We face a shortage of all kinds of health care professionals with expertise in treating older patients: geriatricians, nurse-practitioners, social workers, geriatric psychiatrists. Well, scratch that — we already have such a shortage, as a report from the Institute of Medicine made clear back in 2008.

Child welfare systems working to get more dads into the equation of safe homes
Denver Post
When the social workers took the little girl, who had been abused by her mother’s boyfriend, they asked the child’s mother where the father was. “She said I had gone back to Africa,” the Liberian immigrant said. In fact, Jama hadn’t gone anywhere — and he was still paying child support.

Blogger Spreads News of Anti-Semitic ‘Jew Count’ at University of Toronto
Forward (blog)
The reported anti-Semitic behavior of a professor of social work (as well as some of her students) took place in late 2009. One of the professor’s U of T colleagues published an account of it in the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism in 2010, and the Canadian Jewish News ran a story on it in early that same year.

Text vexed: Cellphone texting, especially for teens, has gone beyond handy …
Naples Daily News
“Bullying tactics are expanding with technology, with texting and Facebook and MySpace,” said Kimberly Rodgers, a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) and registered play therapist supervisor (RPT-S) at Monarch Therapy in Naples.

Hospice Social Worker Says Pets Provide Comfort to Dying Patients and Their …
Kansas City Star
Local hospice social worker Debra Stang has released a book called “Hospice Tails: The Animal Companions Who Journey with Hospice Patients and Their Families.” Stang says that, in her experience, the love of a pet can make the course of a terminal illness more tolerable to everyone involved.